NEW YORK – A Saatchi & Saatchi executive at the 2014 MMA Forum discussed two campaigns from Procter & Gamble and Lexus that highlight the growing trend towards leveraging user-generated and social content as cheaper alternatives in creating big branding campaigns.

The conference’s closing keynote outlined four key areas that marketers need to focus on with getting digital right: Intimacy, social, transactions and mobile. The executive pointed out a campaign that Team One, a division of Saatchi & Saatchi North America, worked with Lexus on that leveraged influencers that fit in with the brand’s fashion and lifestyle image as an example of the new opportunities with digital and social to churn out video and content.

“If you look at that, we actually made a piece of content and a lot of film and a lot of documentary film around it in a parking lot,” said Tom Eslinger, worldwide creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi, New York.

“We didn’t have to go on location, we didn’t really even have to move to El Segundo to do that, and the amount of generated press around that, the amount of push that we got through social, [and] the amount of influencers that took that out for a relatively small amount of money, we actually launched a vehicle,” he said.

“Those are the kinds of things that although it’s not something we built for mobile, we built it with mobile, and it was completely powered by social.”

Social is mobileLexus’ initiative encouraged consumers to take photos posted on Instagram that were turned into a video.

The idea behind the campaign was to give Lexus more content for less marketing spend. In fact, Mr. Eslinger said that the most expensive part of the campaign was getting all of the influencers in one place to orchestrate the effort.

Social and mobile worked in this campaign because everything was simple to share, per the agency executive. The only requirements to participate were either an Instagram or Twitter account.

Another Saatchi & Saatchi project presented was for Procter & Gamble’s Venus that leveraged social and mobile and open APIs to cut down some of the traditional marketing costs.

Tailoring mobile dataAccording to Mr. Eslinger, collecting data is a key goal for the agency’s clients, which include General Mills and Toyota in addition to Lexus and Procter & Gamble.

The problem is that marketers still do not know what to do with data.

The executive highlighted Nike’s SB app as an example of a mobile effort that is able to leverage big data in creating custom mobile experiences.

The app serves as a hub of skateboard tricks with videos that are triggered by motion. For example, tilting backward slows down a video while moving forward speeds up content.

However, these types of programs should be built off of existent assets since consumers are accustomed to particular experiences.

“I try to make sure that we’re building everything from stuff that already exists,” Mr. Eslinger said. “We don’t really want to teach people new behaviors and new ways of playing games [or] new ways of interacting with their phones because I always find that that’s a barrier.”

Final TakeLauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer, New York

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Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer. Reach her at lauren@mobilemarketer.com.